Week 8 can make or break many fantasy football teams, so deciding which WR to start between two closely ranked players can determine whether your team is playoff-bound. Should we start Amari Cooper or Tee Higgins this week? Let’s find out.
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Amari Cooper Fantasy Outlook This Week
Amari Cooper is a talented wide receiver but has a quarterback problem. Deshaun Watson may or may not be hurt, depending on what source you trust, and he was not lighting the world on fire when he played. Cooper got to live the P.J. Walker experience in the last two games, and I don’t think he’s giving it five stars.
Cooper has averaged only three catches for 65 yards in the two games with Walker under center, even though he has a respectable 24% target share. The juicy matchup against a bottom-five defense against fantasy wide receivers will likely go unexploited by the entire Cleveland Browns passing attack this week.
I think this will be 3-4 catches for a performance of 40-50 yards, so he can be a Flex, but I wouldn’t trust Cooper for anything more substantial.
Tee Higgins Fantasy Outlook This Week
Tee Higgins was a no-brainer fantasy WR1-2 but now has fallen far off the board. Whether it’s due to injury to himself, Joe Burrow, or some other issue, Higgins is not performing.
In the last three games, he has had two catches, out due to injury, and then two catches again.
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This averages out to two catches for 19.5 yards in the two games he played in that stretch. What’s more concerning is that even though Burrow seems to be back to his gunslinging self, Higgins has only mustered a 12% target share in those two games and is still nursing the rib injury that kept him out of a game.
The matchup against the vaunted 49ers defense will not bode well for Higgins. I can’t confidently put a number on my expectations of how Higgins will do this week, but I can confidently say I won’t play him.
Which Wide Receiver Should You Start?
In the Pro Football Network Start/Sit Optimizer, PFN’s Consensus Rankings say that Cooper is the player to start. His projected 11.0 points include a projection of 51.7 receiving yards on 3.5 receptions and 0.4 touchdowns. That doesn’t seem like a big stat line, but it outperforms Higgins’ consensus projection (10.5 points).
My ranking for these two wide receivers aligns with the consensus due to his ability to catch the balls thrown to him more consistently than Higgins and a juicy matchup for the Browns.